Is this a record? Important Information

I was using Partition Manager 11 Free to split a 1TB drive into partitions. The drive was a second USB drive I use for backups and misc other stuff, and it was not my boot drive. There was about 350GB of data on there. The plan was to shrink the original single partition down to 400GB and then split the 600GB unpartitioned area into two partitions. I started the first operation and was forced to restart and have the operation continue from DOS. It seemed to proceed normally and within an hour the progress bar had completed and said it was 100% done but there was no activity and it did not exit or restart. As others have voiced, I was afraid to try escape or Ctrl-C to exit in fear of corrupting my HD and the drive light was still showing activity....so I waited, and waited, for several hours. I had to have access to my PC so I ended up forcing a restart.

My computer restarted normally, but the drive I was trying to partition was not showing up in Windows at all. I started PM and it said operations were unfinished and did I want to complete them. I said yes and the Windows progress dialog opened and I was not asked to restart this time. The progress bars remained empty and there was no activity except my HD light was blinking again. Since I had access to my PC again I decided to just let it run, and run, and run. I used Windows performance monitor to look at the HD's activity and it was reading and writing a lot of data, so I still let it go. To make a long story short, it stayed in exactly that state, showing no progress and no time elapsed for 4.5 days!!!! Then all of a sudden it came to life and continued progress for about 30 minutes, completed all remaining tasks and voila it was done and everything was alive and well.

Bottom-line, don't trust the status bar and don't start operations on a big disk if you have any plans of using it in the near future....and absolutely do an image backup before you start, and make sure you have a backup power supply attached to your computer in case of a power outage.

To be fair to the software, and this could be why the operation took so, so long, is that the reason I was trying to partition the drive is that it had gotten very slow. I was going to complete the partitioning, defrag and hope the drive would be a lot quicker again. Again, I'm not sure if this had anything to do with it, but I thought I should mention this just in case it turns out my drive has some issue that caused it to take so long.